Affective assemblages: body matters in the pedagogic practices of contemporary school classrooms

Abstract

Set within the affective turn in cultural and social theory, in this paper, I explore the significance of materiality and matter, most specifically, bodily matter, in the pedagogic practices of contemporary school classrooms. The received view in education is that affect is tantamount to emotion or feeling and that materials, such as bodily affectivity, technologies and texts, are used by teachers and learners to support and advance teaching and learning. Telling a sociomaterial story, I account for how materials participate in pedagogic practice and for what is performed through this participation (e.g. corporeal capacity, changed power relations regarding the subjectivities of teacher and learner and teaching and learning). Drawing on video case data collected as part of a national study, and utilising an analytic of assemblage, I trace affective relations in action towards making an argument about the centrality of affects, as socio-material practices, to teaching-learning events in school classrooms and beyond. Registering bodily as intensity, affect effects change in pedagogical relationships, impelling acknowledgement of its substantive nature and its political import. Altogether, bodily matter matters. Implications of this mattering for education policy and practice are drawn out.